hat there
was no hope of family restoration to be founded on so profound a
blockhead--an ass that could not get into the church--that moped and
wandered about the woods--that trembled when he was spoken to; and so
far from pushing his way in the world, and acquiring a fortune by
running off with an heiress, had not courage enough to look a milkmaid
in the face. I kept out of his sight more than ever, and read _Ivanhoe_
for the fifteenth time. Oh, Friar Tuck! Oh, Brian de Bois Guilbert! What
did I care for Mr Jeeks and his offers for Rayleigh Court?

I was now twenty years of age, with the figure of a grenadier and the
courage of a boarding-school girl; and every day my father's indignation
seemed to increase, when he saw such a fund of marketable qualities
lying useless--my quietness and decorum would have done for the church;
my height and broad shoulders would have qualified me for Gretna Green.
But such a chicken-hearted fellow, he well knew, would sooner die than
mention a postchaise; and so the old gentleman, having ceased for some
years to express his contempt for me with the aid of his walking stick,
and a profusion of epithets unheard of in Johnson's _Dictionary_, took
now to the easier method of a dignified and unbroken silence. It was a
charming change, and I was as happy as Robinson Crusoe in the desert
island before Friday made his appearance. One day in June--"it was the
poet's leafy month of June"--I took my way, as was my Wont, through the
park to the Wilderness. The shadows of the broad thick-foliaged oaks lay
in gigantic masses on the smooth turf, (of which the gardeners were a
few relics of the former herds of deer, in the shape of wide-antlered
stags and dappled roes;) all the sights and sounds of summer beauty were
united in that solitary greensward; and for the first time in my life I
felt a regret pass over me that the grandeur of my family had decayed,
and a faint fluttering became perceptible to me, round my heart, of a
wish to restore our fortunes. But the intense appreciation of my own
deficiencies in which I had been educated, soon dispelled any pleasing
illusions that the self-love of twenty years of age might have excited;
and I fell into the opposite extreme, and rejoiced to think that in me
the family tree would lose its last branch, and that the old house would
crumble into actual ruins, instead of holding forth the false
appearances of solidity and strength which led to the expectation th